THIS monster-free, earth-bound sociological thriller is science fiction for people to whom reality-based science offers better stimulation.

The only universal currency is time. Everybody gets 25 years at birth and year 26 in which to accumulate enough further survival time.

When your timer shows zero, that’s it. No appeal, no avoidance. Dead.

Andrew Niccol’s film is an uncomfortably relevant paradigm for a world still working out how to recover from the GFC and arrange the wealth system to avoid another, where the Occupy movement is struggling to be heard, where choices are becoming fewer and some of George Orwell’s forecasts in “1984” are again rumbling not far beneath society’s surface.

Will’s (Justin Timberlake) mother dies before he can deliver a top-up to her time account. The man he saves from a street gang has a 25-year-old body but his 110-year-old mind has had enough; he gifts all his time to Will and jumps from a bridge.

Will persuades Sylvie (Amanda Seyfried) the daughter of a squillionnaire, to join him in a bid to cripple the system. The chief time keeper (Cillian Murphy) is determined to block this attack on the established order.

Exploring implications of an official determination of how long life lasts, the film invites the audience to form responses to its questions or formulate questions to explain its events. “Logan’s Run” explored a similar dramatic thesis. Niccol’s film sounds a warning for humanity by proposing a scary and provocative analogy for money that does not admit of poverty.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight